5 × $50K grants up for grabs - fully-funded AI fundraising pilots for 5 nonprofits
Everyone’s using AI. Almost no one’s moving donations because of it. We’re partnering with Whitelabel to fund five end-to-end deployments - and picking the cohort through May.
Apr 28, 2026
SPECIAL ISSUE · PARTNERSHIP DROP · 4 min read
The operation that lives in your mind vs. where we want to get to
Every nonprofit in the network has tried AI. Most have a paid ChatGPT seat or two. A few have piloted Copilot. Almost none have moved a single donation metric because of it.
That’s the gap we want to close - not with another webinar, not with a vendor pitch deck, but with five real, funded, end-to-end deployments. So this week’s issue is a special one.
Everyone’s using AI, but who’s seeing the benefit?
We’ve spent the last six months talking to nonprofit ops, fundraising and digital leads across the network. The pattern is consistent: tools are everywhere, outcomes aren’t. Teams report time saved drafting emails but almost none report a measurable lift in donations, click-through, or donor satisfaction.
The orgs that are seeing returns share three things - they treat AI as a teammate not a tool, they have one internal champion empowered to remove friction, and they ship inside enterprise-grade safeguarding from day one.
So we partnered with Whitelabel to fund five nonprofits to do exactly that - properly, end-to-end, in the open.
★ THE DROP
5 grants · $50K each · 6-month pilot
AI for Nonprofits Network (the convening side) × Whitelabel (the build side)
Five nonprofits. Six months. Full pilot deployment of an AI fundraising stack - funded end-to-end, then pro-bono extended through 2027 and 2028 for teams that adopt and want to keep going.
The catch is honest. This isn’t a tool you bolt on. It’s a six-month operational change to how your team raises money, and we’re only funding five teams who can actually carry that.
Interested? Complete a 90-second readiness checker. It isn’t designed to gatekeep funding - it’s designed to make sure the grant lands somewhere it’ll move. Tick what’s true for your team - you’re a strong fit if you can honestly check at least four of six.
★ Self-score in 30 seconds
★ 01 · Champion — Named internal lead with authority. One person empowered to remove blockers across fundraising, ops and IT.
★ 02 · Mandate — Board & exec are bought-in. Senior team is genuinely open to experimentation inside live fundraising - not “let’s see the slide deck first”.
★ 03 · Compliance — Enterprise safeguarding. You’re ready to deploy AI inside SOC 2 and donor-data hygiene from day one.
★ 04 · Stack ready — Donor data is exportable, somewhere. CRM, email tool, payment processor - even messy. We can integrate. We can’t conjure data that isn’t written down.
★ 05 · Capacity — 1 hr / week from the champion. Six months of pilot needs steady contact, not heroics. If your champion is already at 110%, this isn’t the round.
★ 06 · Open — Comfortable being a public case study. Open data, open results, shared with the network. The grant trades funding for visibility.
Full onboarding & deployment time from the Whitelabel team for the six-month pilot window.
All AI token usage across agents, models, and integrations for the duration of the pilot.
Two further years of pro-bono software licensing through 2027 and 2028 for teams that adopt the stack.
What we won’t
Cash grants - this is a deployed pilot, not unrestricted funding. The value lands as software, time and reduced overhead.
Replacing your fundraising team - the AI sits alongside humans, takes a clearly scoped role, and reports up.
Side-of-desk pilots - if there’s no champion and no mandate, we’d rather hold the spot for a team that’s ready.
Black-box deployments - every tool and integration is visible to your team and the network.
The grant is structured so that even after the pilot, your donor processing overheads go down, not up. The grant doesn’t end with a renewal cliff, it ends with a cheaper, smarter fundraising operation than you started with.
🔧 03 · What you’ll actually deploy
The pilot, the metrics, the timeline
Here’s what the pilot will actually test, and the three uplift metrics every funded team will be measured against.
What the pilot tests
01 · Autonomous donation agents - State-of-the-art tests on hyper-personalized email campaigns, AI landing pages, and a new digital front door designed around the donor - not the CMS template.
02 · Hyper-personalized newsletter & touchpoints - Each supporter gets content shaped to their giving history, interests and engagement pattern - at the scale and frequency a comms team of three could never reach manually.
03 · An AI team member on fundraising - A dedicated agent that owns monthly-donor and individual-donor giving strategy alongside your humans - segmenting, nurturing, and following up like a fundraising hire who never sleeps.
★ The three uplift metrics · measured monthly
Increase in donation uptake across individual and / or monthly donors — target +10%
Click-rate to donation interest across all measured outbound touchpoints — target ↑
Satisfaction lift on existing-donor engagement measured at every touchpoint we can attribute — target +%
A couple of pieces of context before you decide whether to apply - what others in the network are doing, and where this grant sits relative to where the field is heading.
Operator note · “The model isn’t AI vs. humans”
Most of the orgs already shipping say the same thing, the lift comes from giving the AI a clearly scoped role, not from replacing anyone. The pilot is built around that lesson.
Funder note · Why a grant, not a discount
A discount asks small teams to find budget they don’t have. A funded pilot lets you prove the lift first, then absorb the (now smaller) cost into next year’s plan.
Compliance note · Enterprise-grade, by default
Every deployment ships with the certifications a corporate IT team would expect - because nonprofit donor data deserves that bar, not a lower one.
The honest bit · Five spots. Self-select carefully.
If you’re stretched, mid-rebrand, or your board hasn’t bought into experimentation - apply for the next round. This one is for teams that can move in July.
★ Ready to be one of the five?
Drop your details, take the readiness quiz, and we’ll be in touch within five working days.
That’s it for this week. Forward to one nonprofit lead who needs to see this or, if that nonprofit is yours, hit the link above.
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